The littlest dinosaur ever was discovered encased in amber

A small chunk of fossilized tree sap holds the most diminutive dinosaur ever found, as indicated by a group of specialists. As BBC News reports, the fossilized sap, called amber, was found in Myanmar and holds what looks somewhat like a small bird skull. Going back somewhere in the range of 99 million years, the old remains are from the Cretaceous period and offer everyone a window into the past they seldom appreciate.

The disclosure, which is the subject of a new research paper published in the journal Nature, does exclude a full skeleton, however, researchers can evaluate the size of the dinosaur dependent on its skull alone. They trust it might have been as small as the most diminutive species of bird alive today.

Everyone frequently considers dinosaurs enormous, hulking beasts that governed the land, making the earth shake underneath their feet. While the facts demonstrate that a few species were bigger than any land creatures everyone sees today, numerous dinosaur species were smaller than humans, and some of them were downright puny.

This minor fossil from Myanmar proposes the dinosaur it originated from may have been as small as the bee hummingbird, which maximizes at around over two inches in length and weighs not exactly a penny. The new dinosaur species has been named Oculudentavis khaungraae.

“Animals that become very small have to deal with specific problems, like how to fit all sensory organs into a very small head, or how to maintain body heat,” Professor Jingmai O’Connor, co-author of the work, said in a statement. “It’s the weirdest fossil I’ve ever been lucky enough to study. I just love how natural selection ends up producing such bizarre forms. We are also super lucky this fossil survived to be discovered 99 million years later.”

The creature, while small, seems to have been appropriate to prey on insects. Its beak-like jaws were lined with tiny teeth that would have made it simple for it to snatch bugs. This is common of small bird species today, and features what researchers have believed for quite a while: The dinosaurs of a huge number of years prior became the birds of today.

Fossils of this size are once in a while found because of their fragile nature. People don’t often observe bones this minor surviving for about 100 million years, yet the way that this little dinosaur became involved with tree sap that hardened permitted it to be preserved. “This discovery highlights the potential of amber deposits to reveal the lowest limits of vertebrate body size,” the researchers write.